All Hallows' Evil

Valerie Wolzien

All Hallows' Evil was my first, and very likely last, foray into the world of Valerie Wolzien's bedroom community of Hancock, Connecticut. Not necessarily because the book was bad, or the mystery wasn't workable. It's the little niggling details that really dropped the ball here.

Amateur sleuth Susan Henshaw is at the library one Halloween day when she stumbles upon a body in the stacks. It looks like a prop, but turns out not to be. Later on, the town's newest celeb, morning talk show host Jason Armstrong, turns up dead on his own front porch. Obviously, something is not right in the town of Hancock. Susan and her sidekick Kathleeen, with a little help from the town's new sheriff, get to work trying to figure out whodunit.

All well and good, to be sure. Nothing we haven't seen and enjoyed in a passel of other mystery novels. What sets this one apart is some painful sentence construction, grammatical errors that are too consistent to be editors' mistakes, and some continuity errors that are almost painful to behold (my favorite: about two-thirds of the way through the novel, Susan gets home late. Her husband immediately jumps up and says, “Where have you been? I was worried about you?” They barely have time to get another two sentences in the conversation before Susan asks him why he wasn't worried, and he not only admits to it, but then goes on to offer up a valuable clue. Oops.)

You may be better off sticking with that passel of other mystery novels. Stylewise, the first name that came to mind when I tried to think of a comparison was Marcia Muller; if you enjoy Wolzien's work but have been bothered by the niggles above, you might want to give Muller a try.